Well, time for my first moving report. I had hoped to have it online first thing on Monday... but on Monday, the phone wasn't on like it was supposed to be. SBC (the utility company formerly known as Southwestern Bell) had all of our info wrong, so they couldn't turn on the service.

But that's OK... it took most of Monday to unload the 17' U-Haul, and we got the truck back in plenty of time. Sometime in the first few days, we discovered that the gas had to be turned on (we thought it was all electric... duh!)

The computer seemed to develop a complex during the move, and I had to do some major repairs on the system, the last couple of days. There was something stupid hanging everything up, but I finally tracked it down and shut it down.

So this afternoon, while waiting for the gas company to show up, I've been moving furniture and try to set up my studio. Last week, I had ambitious visions of having everything set up and rolling on MONDAY, so I have to apologize for that not happening, yet. But it looks like we're ready to start production again, even though I do have to divide my time well with looking for a new job and drumming up commercial art work.

But the greatest, most fantastical news is that I am now out of the desert! I am now out of the wasteland! The blinds are partially open, and I see a laundromat across the street, where I did two loads of laundry this morning. Cars and trucks pass by in either direction. Kids were walking home from school, an hour or so ago. A block down, there's a place that serves great ribs that I can't afford. Down the street in either direction are grocery stores. Not far, tons of shopping centers, and a major mall. A bit farther off, downtown Dallas, a city I am at least very familiar with.

This is a great chance to put my life back on track... the challenge now is to make a good living and keep up with the rent, all that good stuff. You can live in the desert on almost nothing, but why would you want to? And I did for WAY too long.

HI CARS!! I'm glad to see you've found new joie de vivre with your move. Although I'm getting a little fidgety with all the forum moves. First we ran to the tagboard, and then the floating village, then the forum ashex set up, and now here. ::squirms::

Anyway, there shouldn't be any forum moves up to now. The Fantasy Forum just needs to be fixed, and the Floating Village was just a sort of extra tagboard to tide us over, when I thought it might only be a week fixing the forum. When I did that, though, I should have thought just to go ahead and do this instead.

Although some of those recent posts are a little embarrassing. Complaints about the "abandoned forum", until I thought to have it hidden (yeah, the Sinfest forum is "abandoned" because Tatsuya never posts there)... posts by me during my most zealous "must have new readers, must have new readers!!!" phase... oh, well. All water under the bridge. *gets a ticket from the Cliche Cop*

How's the IRC channel going? Anybody getting anything going in there? I should be able to drop by there soon, too, sometime or other.

Anyway, you guys should see my drawing board now. It's bright and shiny and waiting for Elf Life to be cracked open out of the Elf Life box and return to life.

I will also get a hot shower tonight, since we now have hot water. Whee!

On the unofficial back-up forum, The Temp guy makes all new members guardians whenever he/she is bored. You get a random password when you sign up for that place and you can change it to whatever you like it to be. The rules are basicly the same as the Keenspot forums. And the best part is that you don't have to sign up/register to post on that forum.

As a matter of fact, I don't think any Elf Life forum requires you to sign up/register to post.

WizardInABox wrote:Explains all the outdated posts then. So which is it? Are we here, or are we here?

Fantasy Forum is still down; this one is temporary; readers can create additional forums, but they're not official forums.

There has been no move since we established the official Elf Life Fantasy Forum. And as long as there are no more posts about me "abandoning" this one, I can keep it open as a permanent fallback, if we ever have technical problems again... which wasn't often on kyokipress.com, I should remind everybody. The current situation has cropped up because kyokipress.com's host moved servers around, and seems to have permanently foobarred the script (the same thing happens here at Keenspot, when our servers get moved around. I try not to run PERL scripts on elflife.com anymore for that very reason).

I didn't want to let this out of the bag too soon, because Kai wanted to make sure this would work -- the plan is to convert the current Elf Life Fantasy Forum to phpBB. It should work, but it's a lengthy process, and Kai will have to devote a very large chunk of uninterrupted time to it.

When that happens, the URL of the official Elf Life Fantasy Forum may change *slightly*. But it will essentially be *not* a move. It will be an upgrade to the current forum, and will contain all of the past threads and RPG stuff. Kai and myself have been trying to be very careful in not announcing any temporary fix as a "NEW FORUM" specifically to avoid the kind of confusion that has cropped up while we've been web-incapacitated.

The reason this Keenspot board can't be the official, central Elf Life forum is that I've found our forum works best if we can branch out... things such as the role playing and Carson's Webcomic Clinic... the structure of the Keenspot boards is too limiting for that. And if we had moved out to the Fantasy Forum earlier, we would probably have the entire Elf Life Adventurers board as part of our system, too, instead of splintering up. (Just to make sure this is absolutely clear, ELA is the official Elf Life RPG... Fantasy Forum is the official forum... and btw, ELA 4 is in progress, and I hear it's hilarious)

This is a great board for a cascading free-for-all General Discussion, but it's not organized. The Fantasy Forum allows us to become more like a family in a small home, a relaxing retreat.

invinible wrote:http://www.carsonfire.com/index.php?subaction=showcomments&id=1068873243&archive=&start_from=&ucat=14& is the official temp forum.

The Floating Village page WAS the official temp forum, because I thought it would be only a few days, maybe a week. THIS is now the official temp forum, and we will soon have the link changed on the forum page to reflect that. That is the only change I am instituting now that I am back, until the main forum is upgraded.

Whew. Okay, I'm okay now. Heh. Sorry that the move took longer than you'd hoped, but these things almost always do. But now comes what I consider to be the fun part...finding places for your stuff in your new place! I don't like unpacking, per se, but I DO enjoy interior decorating, ha.

Don't worry too much about the forums; you guys have a lot more to do in your real lives first. We'll survive, whiney as we may be about our lack of forum. Just ignore us. We love you anyway!

The moment is near when, by a procedure of active paranoic thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.

I guess I'm just a little reluctant to let go of the reins of power so I guess my board will be the back-up back-up board? so if keenspot goes down we can use the one on proboards! or we can use my phpbb2 one as soon as my dad tells me what database we're using....
And Kaichi, if the ikonboard is being so anal why not switch to phpbb2? you can download a convertor so you can save all the posts and message boards!
and it uses no perl, only php so there won't be any major screw ups if the server moves!

But I say unto you, that whosoever
looketh on a woman, to lust after her,
hath committed adultery already in
the heart.
4 Nephi 12:28
Translation: Don't look at porn.

Whew. Okay, I'm okay now. Heh. Sorry that the move took longer than you'd hoped, but these things almost always do. But now comes what I consider to be the fun part...finding places for your stuff in your new place! I don't like unpacking, per se, but I DO enjoy interior decorating, ha.

Don't worry too much about the forums; you guys have a lot more to do in your real lives first. We'll survive, whiney as we may be about our lack of forum. Just ignore us. We love you anyway!

Heh I don't mind the decorating stuff, either. But this moving around of heavy boxes and furniture, scrubbing and cleaning things and dealing with several years' worth of desert dust is not fun. (O.o)

I'm hoping to get back to the forum stuff, asap. We're on a pretty tough schedule, at the moment, so I'll have to work it in as I have time. I have web design work and some new art commissions, this month, which must take precedence over the free stuff. At least there's this one for EL folks to use, as a backup. My folks will just have to grit their teeth and hang on, because I'm not going to splinter my own forums, again, and have to deal with collecting posts from myriad sources all over the web. People get confused (and sometimes very ticked off), if you make them go to a bunch of different places to post in forums.

ashex wrote:And Kaichi, if the ikonboard is being so anal why not switch to phpbb2? you can download a convertor so you can save all the posts and message boards!and it uses no perl, only php so there won't be any major screw ups if the server moves!

(O.o) *throws marshmallows at Ashex*

Dude...scroll up and read Carson's message.

We've been talking, on and off, about PHPbb for some time, but I wasn't sure how I wanted to go about it, or even if I DID want to go about it. I knew it would be a HUGE job, to convert both forums and somehow manage to integrate them, at the same time. I've got a lot of fancy finagling to do, in that arena, and I'm NOT looking forward to it. (O.o)

Lazy's been a big advocate of PHPbb, too. I was reluctant, because of seeing how poorly it runs on KeenSpot. But then, I remembered that they're trying to run one billion and two forums on the same script set. I doubt we'd have the kind of problems they have, here. We have only the Fantasy Forums and the ShadowFall forums to worry about, and not anywhere near the kind of traffic the Keen boards get.

ashex wrote:c) was plotting to take over the world through confusion and idiocy.

Oooh! ooooooh! If it's d, can I be one of your minions? I'm good at confusion and idiocy! ...wait, do you mean experiencing it or inflicting it on others? Oh well, same difference! *bounces up and down*

I too am a fan of phpBB, but I do not envy you the job of converting stuff over...

And I think that CF should be lording over all other online cartoonists at this point! "Ha, your webcomic only has ONE forum? Well my fans love me and each other so much we have 3!"

Besides, I need as many places to waste time as possible so that I can continue to procrastinate on the paper I'm supposed to be writing.